bathroom tile is not for the faint of heart...

Uses shower tile as an accent wall.  Design Winner.

Ok, so my mom was asking about ideas for bathroom walls.  Really, in my experience, when it comes to bathrooms tile is the right solution.  Know you don't have to tile every square inch of the room and please stay away from a niche theme.  What I mean by that is don't make your bathroom a trend that can easily be outdated.  There are classic ideas about bathrom design that hold pretty much true through the last 100 years.  I think neutral colors are best.  Stay with really light colors.  White or light greys are good.  If you have a color scheme that is important you can pick subtle pastels (not my first choice but they can work) that are closer to white.  The reason you really want to stick with neutral colors and fairly light colors are that bathroom usually have very little access to natural daylight.  Unless you are awesome and have a totally spectacular skylight or you are lucky enough to live in the tropics and have and ocean view from the throne you typically don't have a lot of daylight coming into your bathroom.  Keeping the colors light not only make your bathroom feel brighter, but a light colored bathroom also feels cleaner.  Of course, if you're not a big fan of cleaning the bathroom then you may just want to paint everything black and move on.



Combines light tile with the warmth of wood



So...options.  Like I stated, tile is really the best option for most people.  It is fairly inexpensive and gives you a wide variety of finished and sizes.  Alternatives to tile are acrylic sheet coverings.  This is basically a plastic wall paper (not exactly, but you get the picture).  These do the trick.  They are easily cleaned, non-porous material, and can come pre-molded to include shelves, soap dishes, etc.  These work, but also look pretty cheap (it's what I have in my bathroom and I so no judgement here, right).  On the other end of the spectrum you have stone.  Beautiful variations in texture and color and natural modeling.  However, most of us can't afford that sort of luxury in our bathrooms.  It is fairly environmentally friendly because it's not a processed material, but often times the cost to ship marble from Italy can use up a lot of dead dinosaurs.  So we come back to tile.  The best options is to tile your shower walls (floors and ceiling are ok too) and then pick a logical point along the wall to stop the tile and transition to a painted drywall wall.  The floor is great if you can tile the whole floor, but that's not always what people want or what they can afford.  The one thing you should do is this.  Wood flooring can be ok in a bathroom (not the shower though) but you will have to transition from one material to the other.  Transitions in materials are always tricky (think of the change from carpet to kitchen floor material) especially when you want to prevent the penetration of water through the floor.  That is the key issue with any material you put in your bathroom.  You need a material that can be easily cleaned, can withstand the cleaning process, and resists water penetration (because nobody wants to step out of their bath and through the floor).  One other note, when using drywall in your bathroom (non-shower areas only) make sure you are using "greenboard".  This is essentially water resistant gypsum board.  There is also cement board you can use which is better and more water resistant, but also harder to handle and more expensive.  Alright, I hope this helps.  And mom, if you want me to design your guest bathroom for you I know a great place to buy plane tickets to Arizona. 

If you have specific questions about your bathroom or want some design ideas, leave a comment in the comments section and we can chat about your project.



Modern bathroom with black tile.